Today we face a climate of ever increasing misdirection by popular media. This site, along with others, aims to reveal the reality of America and the loss of fact inherent to the over riding theme of our current political and social confusion: Purposeful deception.

Friday, November 11, 2011

This Veterans Day, Don't Just Salute Veterans -- Rally With Them

Here's a surprise that the
power elites really hate to see: Many members of the 1 percent are joining the
"We are the 99 percent" movement in various Occupy Wall Street
protests.

I don't mean that corporate
CEOs and hedge fund billionaires are suddenly in the streets to show solidarity
with millions of Americans who're fed up with the systemic inequality and
corruption infesting our economic and political systems. No, no -- those swells
aren't about to dirty their Guccis with any street action. Rather, I'm talking
about another, extra-special 1 percent of our society -- the soldiers who've
been the "boots on the ground" in Washington's
long misguided and bloody wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan.

This Veterans Day, thousands
of vets from America's
abused "war class" are not marching in little feel-good parades.
Instead, they're rallying with the Occupy movement, expressing their anger at
being used in two senseless wars that enriched corporate contractors while the
troops lucky enough to come home alive can't find decent jobs and are shorted
on the health and education programs they desperately need.

In New
York last week, more than 100 of our nation's soldiers marched in
uniform from the VietnamVetsPlaza
to Wall Street, where they stood in formation in front of the Stock Exchange.
"Corporate profits on the rise," they chanted, "soldiers have to
bleed and die." Far from offering the salutes they deserve (much less the
help they've earned), the Powers That Be deployed a line of New York police to block these peaceful
protesters from the financial manipulators inside and then deployed another
line of police on horseback wielding nightsticks to threaten them.

This disgraceful show of
force against those who've fought our wars exposes just how perverted and
corrupt the power elites have become -- and why all of us should support this
democracy movement.

Here's some free advice for
America's financial and political leaders who're eager to shut down the Occupy
protests: If you want to woo the public, try to keep your riot-clad police from
shooting an Iraqi war veteran in the face and brutally beating another with
clubs -- especially when the unprovoked assaults are being videoed, as recently
happened in Oakland.

You're welcome.

The increasing presence of
war veterans in the Occupy protests makes it difficult for officialdom to claim
that the movement is nothing but aimless, shiftless kids who pose a threat to
decent society. Indeed, the real threat to "decent society" (by which
the elite mean themselves and their plutocratic rule over our economy and
politics) is their own disdainful treatment of America's workaday majority.

After all, even a dog knows
the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked. Like millions of
knocked down middle-classers and held-down poor people, a tidal wave of
soldiers who've served three, five, seven or more tours in hellish war zones
have been coming home to a jobless, low-wage, relentlessly grim economy.

The unemployment rate for
vets is 12 percent, a third higher than the national rate -- for young vets,
it's 20 percent, more than double the national figure. And some 50,000 more
soldiers are to return from the Mideast wars
by year's end.

So, what's the plan? What
shall we do with them? After World War II, a more enlightened establishment
created the GI Bill to absorb that surge of returning soldiers -- but our
"leaders" today have nothing approaching that enlightenment, nor even
a plan to have a plan.

The penthouse swells can
unleash their police to break up protests, but that only fuels the fury. Now
they're cracking down on veterans -- people who know how to use guns. It's time
to deal with the growing crisis of joblessness and inequality in America. For
more information, contact www.VeteransForCommonSense.org.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read
features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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